From the Publisher
"Keith Beattie's impressive analysis of popular culture representations identifies the core metaphors around which popular memory of the war in Vietnam has coalesced—the open wound, the silenced voice, and longing for home. . . . Beattie provides dramatic demonstration of the mechanisms and mediations within commercial culture that transform the hurts of history into stylized representations that hide the very past they claim to recover."
-George Lipsitz,author of Time Passages
"Offers the broadest perspective to date on the social and cultural legacy of the Vietnam War."
-Andrew Ross,New York University
"Bold. . . . The greatest pleasure the book offers is the often thought-provoking close reading of both familiar and long-forgotten movies and fiction of the Vietnam War era."
-The Journal of American History,
"Beattie shows us how ideological strategies operate and, thereby, prepares us to outflank them in the future. The importance of his contribution to the study of American culture can hardly be overstated."
-Contemporary Sociology,
". . . brilliantly shows how the war lost abroad was subsequently won at home."
-American Quarterly